On about Day 15 of Israel’s war with Hamas, and before the Israeli army’s clearly imminent ground invasion of Gaza had begun, I steeled myself for a four-month war.
I was still hovering between shock, horror, and fear like everyone else around me in Israel following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre and mass hostage-taking. Back then it was still being called Ha’Shabbat ha’Shkhorah, the Black Sabbath.
Four months, I thought, was surely an overestimation. Yet like a long-distance runner preparing for a race with no clear finish line ahead, I thought better to prepare mentally for a long haul.
Why We Wrote This
On the second anniversary of the massacre that ignited the war in Gaza, Dina Kraft, the Monitor’s correspondent in Israel, reflects on how Oct. 7 has exhausted Israelis and changed the society around her, which is experiencing anger, doubts, and concern over internal dissent.
But Tuesday marks two years of war since that day of bulldozed border fences and a killing spree along Israel’s southern border that claimed the lives of 1,200 civilians and soldiers alike inside army posts and family bedrooms and at an outdoor music festival.
Memorials are being held this week at the kibbutzim overrun by Hamas, where some neighborhoods were reduced to rows of blackened, burned-out homes, with their melted lawn furniture and scattered tricycles and soccer balls waiting for children who will never return.
These frozen scenes speak to the sense in Israel that even two years to the day later – and with the final details of a possible peace being negotiated as Israelis and Palestinians look on with bated breath – the country feels stuck in a state of suspended animation.
When the hostages are back, Israel can focus on healing itself as a society, the protest leaders, hostage families, and regular people tell one another. For now, a fundamental societal covenant of “not leaving anyone behind” in the field of battle lies shattered by the hostages’ long ordeal, awaiting repair.
Meanwhile, over two years the visual landscape around us has transformed, still bathing passersby with reminders of the bloodiest day in Israeli history. Murals depict those killed, like the one emblazoning the outdoor wall of my neighborhood pizza parlor of a young couple killed at the music festival. Stickers plaster walls at bus stops and train stations, and are on benches and even the trailhead of a hiking path in the Galilee I walked last week. Each bears the face of a young person killed that day or in its aftermath and usually a quote – and a barcode with more details – by which to remember them.
That sense of emotional exhaustion, a communal inability to breathe, has been compounded by an ever-rising toll of soldiers’ deaths in Gaza. Reinforcing that are unresolved questions and anger over the motives of a government strategy to prosecute a prolonged war seeking “total victory” over Hamas, which many criticize as a way to evade political responsibility for leaving the southern border catastrophically unprotected on Oct. 7.
A soldier’s mother
Recently, a soldier’s mother went from obscurity to an appearance on the nightly news for her viral social media post describing why she drove to her son’s base the day before he was to re-enter Gaza, intending to physically block him from going. She did not succeed even in entering the base. But on TV she explained that after two years of trying to “keep things together” she had broken, and was willing to be seen as “falling apart” before her son, if that would save his life in a war she no longer believed in.
Other parents wrote her, saying her public confession spoke for them. Some sectors of society are debating the morality of military service if this is indeed a political war, not a defensive war of “no choice” that Israelis initially prided themselves in fighting just after the Oct. 7 attack.
The morality of the devastating civilian toll in Gaza, where tens of thousands have been killed, is less discussed, as people remain largely focused on their individual and collective trauma.
That said, an inner moral accounting has grown in recent months. Some left-wing intellectuals have been saying the quiet part out loud: How will Israel, a state founded as a refuge for a persecuted people, recover from the stain of what Gaza’s civilians have endured?
I feel ill every time I receive English translations of the Israeli army’s text messages to Gazans, warning them to leave certain neighborhoods ahead of planned air strikes, and then hear the roar of jets that usually follows. Not long after come WhatsApp messages from Palestinian sources with the number of people wounded and killed and images of soot-covered children looking for parents.
Meanwhile, many Israelis feel highly defensive in the face of mass anti-war protests abroad, and the outright questioning within some of them of Israel’s very right to exist. Soaring antisemitic attacks in Europe and America impact the Israeli mindset. Friends and neighbors ask me about “how bad” antisemitism is in America when I return from visits, assuming it lurks behind every corner.
Israel’s mood, in numbers
A new Hebrew University poll suggested 2025 was even harder for Israelis to bear than 2024. The portion of those who are pessimistic about the state of the country is growing, rising from 34% in 2024 to 48% now. Fewer than one-quarter are confident their children will live better lives than they have. The survey also found about 24% of Israelis have considered leaving the country, including 33% of opposition voters.
In a country where army reservists have lost hundreds of days of work serving in either Gaza or along the northern border with Lebanon, 45% report financial harm from the war. That number is markedly higher for Israeli Arab citizens: 84%.
Those conducting the survey summarized what they saw as a “darker emotional climate” summed up in one word: “fatigue.”
Another important finding: 61% of Israelis rank social and political polarization and violence as more of a threat than external enemies.
I thought of the depth of our own national and personal sense of exhaustion last week when a siren sounded at 1 a.m. My family and I, along with our neighbors, as we have done too often to count in the past two years, stumbled down the stairs to our apartment building’s bomb shelter, a room in which in “normal times” is simply a big dusty storage space of reinforced concrete containing bicycles and strollers.
For months it’s been missiles and drones from Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen, that have roused us from sleep. (The Iran war in June had an entirely different level of danger and fear.) After the requisite 10-minute all-clear, I watched one of my youngest neighbors, 4-year-old Uri, get up from his spot on one of the beanbags put out for just such occasions and walk toward the door.
I offered to carry him back to bed but he shook his small curly head “no.” Eyes half-mast, he marched straight upstairs. Going through the motions exhausted is not new to him – it’s been the experience of half his life.
Monday evening ushers in the Sukkot holiday, when Jews recall their exodus from Egypt and build desert huts called sukkahs – flimsy yet tangible representations of safety and shelter. The hope for Israelis this year is that everyone finds their way home to that.
